Swedish painter and
photographer Ture Sjolander found the communicative breadth and fluidity of
video imagery immensely appealing. Working with Bror Wikstrom, he created
Time,
shown on National Swedish Television in 1966. Time was a half-hour program of
"electronically manipulated paintings." According to Chris Meigh-Andrews, author
of History of Video Art, Sjolander "worked with TV broadcast engineer Bengt
Modin to construct a temporary video image synthesizer which was used to distort
and transform video line-scan rasters by applying tones from waveform
generators." What is more, Sjolander and Wikstrom seem to be the first artists
to have done so. When Nam June Paik visited Sjolander in July and August of
1966, he saw images from Time that almost certainly spurred him onward in his
own image-processing experiments. Further linking the relationship between video
and painting, the images in Time were also produced as limited-edition, signed
and numbered works silk-screened on canvas.

Sjolander's work the next year, Monument, was done in collaboration with Lars Weck and
featured image-processed "portraits"--via distorting signals and electronic
filters--of the Mona Lisa, Charlie Chaplin, Hitler, Picasso, and the Beatles.
Broadcast in five European nations, the program, backed by a reverberant sci-fi
soundtrack of vibraphones and organ washes, was seen by more than 150 million
people. These electronic paintings were
also made into a variety of still images including tapestries, LP art, paintings
on canvas, and posters.

Sjolander, Wikstrom, with
assistance from Lasse Svanberg, Lennart Nilsson, Sven Hoglund's 1969
Space in the Brain extended Frank Malina, Jordan Belson, and other moving-image
artists' fascination with inner and outer spaces. The artists manipulated still
images of the Apollo 11 mission--given to them by the American government--into
full-color abstractions to produce a "space opera" set to searing acid rock by
Hansson & Karlsson. The piece makes use of close-ups of an eyeball, much in
the manner of Kubrick's "Stargate" sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, before
layering in shifting, rotating washes of hot pink, searing yellow, and electric
blue forms, concluding with the overlaying of those video shapes on top of still
images of deep space.